Attention, Reputation and Trust – Path to Business Success

Attention, reputation, and trust are the most critical elements required for your tremendous success and increase your business potential energy.

These three elements are all essential, but at the same time, one of them is more or less critical. I mean that without each of these three elements, the success of the business or entrepreneur will not be as significant as if all three components are implemented and integrated.

The primary task of you as an entrepreneur is to build and implement all three elements if you want to become a superstar on the market.

Attention as a First Element to Your Business Success

I set attention as beginning in this cycle because it is most comfortable to achieve, and it is a starting point for each entrepreneur that wants to build other two elements.

The goal of attention is to attract potential customers. You can achieve attention for free with some viral marketing campaign. The second way that can help you in drawing attention is paying for it by using different marketing tools.

When we talk about the free attention, it is more difficult to achieve without the proper installment of other two elements inside you and your company. Without other two parts, you cannot expect that the people, your potential customers will spread the word to their friends. If they don’t trust you, they will not recommend you to others. Because of that, I think that this is the cycle made of three stages that can bring success to your businesses.

Reputation is the second stage

The second stage is more difficult to acquire and at the same time more critical element than the first one.

It is a simple mix of several things:

Public Opinion. What is the public opinion about you and your small business?

Social Evaluation. How the community evaluates you and your small business?

Identity Defined by Other People. What kind of identity do you get from other people?

According to this, the reputation is some thought from other persons about you and your company. Because it is thought of other persons, you as an entrepreneur don’t have the power of influence in this sphere. But, also you cannot say that it is impossible, and you don’t need to do something to increase your reputation.

It is not impossible because various media have the power of influence in the public opinion. So, if you design a campaign to increase your reputation, you can quickly build a strong reputation. Simply, sometimes you can pay to those influential media to create a good public opinion about you and your business. In such a way you will increase your reputation.

Trust as the third element

The last element, but most crucial element in this cycle is the trust. Trust is the only thing that could not be bought with money, but simply you need to deserve it. To build the trust for you and your company, you cannot influence through different mediators as influential media.

It is something, which will increase the reputation of any business and will attract the attention of new potential customers. Everything will be much easier when you succeed in building trust. So building the trust is something that should be a strategic goal for you as an entrepreneur. For example, you can decide to start building trust around your brand using blogging for business. But, it is not an easy thing when you need to create amazing content in order to build trust.

An interesting correlation of this element with the economy or as an economy driver give us Stephen M.R. Covey in his bestselling book The Speed of Trust:

When trust goes down, speed will also go down and cost will go up. When trust goes up, speed will also go up and costs will go down.

It is simple when we don’t have the trust we cannot expect to attract attention and build a solid reputation. At the same time, the costs will be bigger because we will invest big amounts of money in attention and build the reputation.

This is the cycle. If people trust in you, you will quickly attract more customers that will spread the word about your business. This word will help you to attract more attention and reputation that will be supported by strong trust.

At the end an example related to attention, reputation and trust

Let’s consider one example.

With the help of a marketing, you can attract attention. This is your short-term goal. The potential customer that was attracted in a best case will become a buyer. If we succeed from the first time to build trust in his eyes, he will return and buy something again from your business and in best case will spread a word about your business.

If you fail to incorporate that trust in his eyes, you will need again to attract him with something different in the future. In the worst cases, he will simply go to another business that would attract them.

Let’s continue with the same example but different scenario:

The potential customer which attention was attracted will attempt to validate your business through your reputation. If he finds that you don’t have a good business reputation, the story will end here and money that you spent to attract his attention is paid for nothing.

Author

Dragan Sutevski is a founder and CEO of Sutevski Consulting, creating business excellence through innovative thinking. Get more from Dragan on Insider's Page. Contact: info at sutevski dot mk or connect on Google+

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